Monitoring of network traffic has become ubiquitous in the field of networking for troubleshooting and to support various applications. Techniques include local traffic monitoring and remote traffic monitoring. Local traffic monitoring involves the use of a network analyzer coupled to a local switch or network device. Packets received or transmitted from a local port are duplicated and also sent to another local port that is coupled to the network analyzer. The network analyzer then analyzes the traffic. In remote traffic monitoring, the duplicated packets are sent over the network to a remote switch that is coupled to the network analyzer. The traffic is analyzed at the remote location.